Danny Smith

Consultant

Armakuni

Pole Star EAM

Chief Operations Officer

Oyster®

Consultant - Remote Workplace Design & People Ops

Delocate (acquired by Oyster)

Principal Consultant

RED Academy

VP Technology

Global Curriculum Director, Technology

Lead Instructor

Ada. National College for Digital Skills

Curriculum Designer & Lecturer

CharlieHR

Senior Software Engineer

Sparta Global

I wore *a lot* of hats as we grew from a 3-employee startup to 80+ folks

All Sorts

Royal Air Force Air Cadets

Adjutant, Central Training Team, HQ RAFAC

COO & Consultant | Creating high-performance remote organisations 👨‍💻🌍

I work with leaders to intentionally design remote organisations & ways of working, laying the foundations for rapid scaling, long-term organisational health, and a globally distributed workforce.

I spent 2021 at Oyster, scaling their fully-remote (globally distributed) company from 14 to 500 people (and a $1bn valuation). Which was absolutely wild.

I work mostly at the intersection of system design, human behaviour, remote work & operations. I'm convinced that knowledge work has no borders and the "remote work revolution" has the power to make the world a fairer and more equal place for everyone. Globally distributed companies are the future.  And the remote workplace should be diverse, safe & supportive for all.

I talk about "Organisational Health" a lot because healthy orgs feel calm when ploughing through unknown waters at 1000mph and can operate on the edge of chaos without being chaotic: much better for our people, and our business. Since systemic health problems have a disproportionately large effect on distributed remote teams (and quickly compound with scale), I'm on a mission to help folks be more intentional about how they design & transform remote-first orgs.

➡️ Read more on this → https://danny.is/writing/organisational-health

I love meeting new folks, so hit me up if you wanna chat 🙂☎️

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Wanna learn about remote best practices? 👇

· Oyster Reef → https://oysterhr.notion.site/Welcome-to-The-Reef-Oyster-s-Open-Source-Employee-Guide-fc482e3f107c4afd8c85ed217f1d0c1d
· Some tiny remote working tips → https://danny.is/remote

If you've read this far you *might* be interested to know...

· I've a sporadic sideline in personal coaching and team facilitation.
· I used to be a software engineer, but realised I have a much bigger impact when I help others do their thing better. And now that's my thing. (I still code, but just for fun.)
· Before that I was a blues musician. I still perform and jam lots: music has this weird ability to transcend language and cultural barriers.
· I'm a generalist. Obviously. Sorry not sorry.


In the past, my desire to "make work better for everyone" saw me doing:

· Education → curriculum design, learning design, teaching etc.
· Engineering process → DevOps, architecture etc
· Agile coaching & delivery process (SAFe still gives me nightmares).
· Design systems before they were hip.

My mission is to empower leaders of distributed companies to effectively run and scale successful organizations by providing a supportive, collaborative, and resource-rich community.

As the leader of the Running Remote community, I oversee a collaborative hub for founders & People Ops executives managing remote and distributed organizations like Doist, Zillow, Sketch, Atlassian, Medium and Float.

With a deep understanding of the unique challenges faced by remote teams, I’m passionate about creating platforms and spaces where these leaders can share best practices, gain actionable insights, and drive meaningful change.

I also curate the Running Remote Community Gems newsletter on LinkedIn—a handpicked collection of best practices, actionable insights, and real-world examples from Founders, COOs, and People Ops executives at the forefront of remote and distributed work. Check it out here:

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7213858470234644482/

Kasia Triantafelo

I’m thrilled to announce I haven’t commuted to an office in 10 years.
Still waiting for productivity to collapse.

Helping founders and People Ops executives build and run great remote companies | Storyteller & Community Strategist @Running Remote | Subscribe for insights on remote team management

The RTO war may be over.
But something else just started.

The CEO of Randstad says that "you have to be very special to be able to demand a 100% remote job"

In practice, that creates a hybrid hierarchy:
→ High-leverage talent → full flexibility
→ Mid-tier performers → hybrid
→ Junior or commoditized roles → office-first

Here’s what worries me 👀

When flexibility becomes a perk, not a work design choice, we quietly recreate old hierarchies in new ways.

Who gets trust.
Who gets autonomy.
Who gets to design their life around work - and who doesn’t.

Remote work was never about being “special.”
It was about building systems that work for more humans.

What do you think?

There’s a remote company I’ve been a little obsessed with lately...

It’s PostHog.

Their founder, 🦔 james hawkins, might be one of the most unusual creators on LinkedIn (and that’s probably an understatement).

While most founders post corporate wisdom™️, James posts (mostly) jokes - and somehow builds massive credibility doing it.

Everything about PostHog feels different:

When you open their company page, they describe themselves as a team of 168 misfits. In their words: “Because building an unusually great company starts with an unusual team.”

They seem to be breaking every SaaS rule - while running a profitable business.
Open-source products, no outbound sales, protection against viral usage spikes - just to name a few.

And then, there’s the radical transparency - unlike anything I’ve seen before.

You can basically see how the entire company operates on their website:

From the product roadmap, to internal sales manuals, to how much they pay people, to everyone’s goals for the year (yep, really).
Even their code is open-sourced. It’s all public.

Their teams operate as small, autonomous startups inside the company.

Sounds interesting, right?

So…

Would you want to see 🦔 james on the Running Remote stage this year?
I’d personally love a talk that’s half insight, half stand-up. 😄

Help me summon him?

Sorry mum, I didn’t get any closer last year to explaining what I do for a living

And even this cute org chart probably won’t help.

One thing’s for sure - this year won’t be any different.
New roles will appear that we can’t even name yet.

But one thing 2025 gave us - and I’m genuinely excited about - is the rise of the generalist.
For years, we squeezed ourselves into tiny, neat boxes to fit a world obsessed with specialisation.

That world is shifting.
2026 is our year!

So maybe this time, I’ll just tell my mum I’m a generalist. 🙂

How do you explain your job to your family?

Remote-capable workers are driving AI adoption at work.
Gallup just confirmed it.

By Q4 2025:
→ 66% of employees in remote-capable roles used AI vs 32% in non-remote roles
→ 2× more likely to use it frequently
→ ~3× more likely to use it daily

Same tools.
Same economy.
Different job design.

Remote work isn’t just a lifestyle upgrade anymore.
It’s becoming a competitive advantage.

(Also: remote workers buy more cheese, sleep better, get laid more often, and their kids are smarter. The research rabbit hole is deep. Ask Liam Martin 🕳️🐇)

Surprised? Probably not if you’re already leading a remote team.

I was weirdly anxious about taking real PTO from LinkedIn.

I worried I’d miss something - a conversation, a connection, the algo noticing I went quiet (that part sucks the most).

I even scheduled a couple of posts in advance.
Then felt guilty for not engaging 🤯 

Then I realized I didn’t want to engage while I was away.
And that was the whole point.
So I stopped posting.

What did I miss? Nothing!

What did I get instead? Time. Presence. Perspective.

Restarting will take effort.
Still worth it.

Honest question for hiring leaders 
Have you already interviewed a deepfake candidate… without realizing it?

I’ve run masterminds with People Ops leaders for years.
Cybersecurity never came up.
Until last year!

Checkr, Inc. reports that ~40% of job applications now include fake or inaccurate information - and this is the first year they’re seeing it at real scale (more in the article in the comments) 

This isn’t theoretical anymore.
It’s a hiring risk playing out in real time.

Curious - have you encountered this yet? And what are you doing about it? 
 
Also, should we bring AI fraud & deepfakes in hiring to the Running Remote agenda this year?

AI isn’t replacing remote jobs (just yet)
It’s exposing how complex real work actually is

I came across an interesting study via The Washington Post this week -
The Remote Labor Index

What makes this study different?

It didn’t test AI on prompts or benchmarks.

It tested frontier models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, GPT-5, etc.) on real paid remote freelance projects pulled from platforms like Upwork.

We’re talking about work like:
- building interactive data dashboards
- creating 3D product demos and animations
- designing architectural plans and CAD files
- formatting academic papers for publication
- developing small but complete web games

These weren’t cheap or trivial tasks either:
- median project cost: $200
- average completion time for humans: ~29 hours
- some projects ran 100+ hours and into the five figures

The headline result?
👉 The best AI systems completed only ~2.5% of projects end-to-end at a quality a real client would accept!

Yet everywhere I look, people are talking about how much time they’re saving with AI. Where is the disconnect? 

Are we measuring mostly the easy wins?

Silence seems to be the new RTO policy

Monday becomes “important.”
Then Tuesday.
Then Thursday has a “speaker you really shouldn’t miss.”

Promotions?
Funny how they go to the people who are “around more.”

Perks move back to HQ.

Mentorship happens in hallways.
“It’s just hard to mentor people you don’t see,” leaders say.

The office becomes the real workplace again.
Still “flexible,” though. 

It even has a name now - "hybrid creep" - when presence quietly outranks performance.

Honest question: If you want your people to be back in the office, why not say it plainly?

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Kasia Triantafelo's LinkedIn Performance

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